Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart - the father of modern day computing systems showed us the way of human computing.



I came to know about this great personality through the hypertext community. I still remember in my university time,I was fascinated by the web when I came to experience it, but I failed to realize the importance of hyperlinking in a wider context. To me it looked to me just like "a href" tag within HTML which I took for granted. But can we imagine the web without links today? They are as synonymous as the web itself.



And from there I made my entry into reading Open HyperDocument System and to Douglas Engelbart.



Can we ever imagine "personal" computing without a mouse, display editing, Outline processing, Video-conferencing, hypermedia, multiple windows, linking, in file object addressing? He is the one who is credited with all and that also way back in 1968!!



In 1968 (an era in which computers were just number crunching machines) he and his team did a landmark demonstration causing shock to everyone. The videos and pictures of this are available and I was myself shocked to see all this in one go. I thought of all these techonologies to have had evolved slowly over a period of time.



Stanford in 1998 organised a symposium on Douglas Engelbart - an Unfinished Revolution. The videos of the symposium are available. Though these are a bit long, but I think they are a must see. Videos



There were a number of interesting talks at the symposium.



I thought everyone would have been blown apart by that demo in 1968. But it's wrong. That era was led by people from Artifical Intelligence and some even thought its just crap, and one should make machines intelligent rather than making machines to be used for knowledge workers. Can we imagine that today?



One of the presenters highligted the effect between fast and slow movements. Fast movements like technology changes fade away fast, Slow changes involving paradigm shifts provide the real continuity on a longer term. We can predict things at 5 year (technology) scale, but can we say how things will be 30 years or 100 years down the line? We can make wild gusesses but it takes a lot to seriously think on that scale!



And the most interesting one was: Can we have a Moore's Law on Organizational capability ?



Douglas Engelbart's aim was not to make technology to show document editing or the like but to make computers in a way which increases the collaborative capability of humans to be more productive. This is what we still miss to a large extent even today.



We live in a world where computing is still data crunching but on a different scale. We live in set paradigms and are bound by set paths. We stil need to work out what do we require for providing intutive interfaces for humans which anyone can use and at the same time increase our productivity.



With more digital mobile devices penetrating our world, we need to work more effectively rather than replicating the PC model on these devices.